Week Three Question: What is an ageing society? - Growing Old Around The Globe Discussion Question

Week Three Question: What is an ageing society?

DISCUSSION

I work as an intern in a free clinic in rural southwestern Virgina.  I provide mental health counseling services.  Before I returned to school for my Masters of Mental Health Counseling, I was an insurance agent.  I had over 600 clients in this area of the state.  Now, at the clinic, I have 30 clients.

While working as an insurance agent, I sold multiple types of insurance - including long-term care products, annuities, and life insurance.  This is a rural area, and there are many in poverty and/or who have little education.  I saw both a lack of adequate financial planning to account for the span of a lifetime and I saw people who were sold products which were not appropriate.  

Since working at the free clinic, I see many people who are elderly through accumulation of years or who are elderly through physical changes from disease, lack of health care, or from many years of physical labor.  Not having financial resources to take care of their basic needs is frightening to them.  Looking at a future of limited health, increasing disability, and lack of resources is terrifying to them.

So, when I compare what I know about insurance with the understanding that so many of my community have not enough money to put food on the table and to keep the lights on, I find a huge disconnect.  Yes, my people worry about the future - what will happen to them as they age further.  However, that is a distant concern when the immediate need is figuring out how to buy groceries or to have enough gas to drive to a food pantry.... or how to find transportation to the pantry as there is NOT enough money for car, gas, or aught else.

What solution might exist, I am not wise enough to know.  However, I am very certain there is immediate and severe need for this discussion.

ARTICLE:  Long Term Care

http://www.asaging.org/blog/costs-rising-consumers-remain-ignorant-about-long-term-care

Costs Rising, Consumers remain ignorant about long term care

By Laura Weber Rossman

As the need for long-term care grows with the number of aging baby boomers, options for covering its cost remain in flux.

These three national situations may affect the way people pay for long-term care services in the future:

1. January 2013 saw the repeal of the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) Act because it was deemed fiscally unsustainable. CLASS was a federal solution to establish a public long-term care insurance program as part of the healthcare reform act. Such insurance would have been available through employers with no medical underwriting.
   After the law’s repeal, a 15-member commission was created to recommend a “plan for the establishment, implementation and financing of a comprehensive, coordinated and high quality system that ensures the availability of long-term care services and supports for individuals in need of such services and supports.” The commission is set to begin work June 27 and its report is due at the end of September.
   
2. Qualifying for and procuring long-term care insurance will become more difficult and expensive for some, as insurance companies providing long-term care insurance have begun to ask more medical questions and require more tests during the application process.
   Also, companies have begun using gender rating. Single women will see prices rise 20 percent to 40 percent (this only impacts new policies, not those already in force), because long-term care insurers are experiencing higher payouts for women, who live longer than men.
   One long-term care insurance company, Genworth, announced its gender rating for new policies last April. And in May it said it was stopping new sales of the AARP-branded long-term care insurance products, which leaves AARP without a long-term care insurance product for its members.
   
3. As both public policy and private industry search for solutions to the high cost of long-term care, consumers remain in a state of denial. A recent study by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that two-thirds of people ages 40 and older say they have done little or no planning for long-term care.
   Not surprisingly, three out of 10 people surveyed didn’t even want to think about getting older, and of those who had thought about future long-term care needs, only a quarter predicted they would need long-term care help in the future. Also, as we have seen in many surveys before, many respondents mistakenly thought Medicare would pay for nursing home or home health care.
   Such uncertainty and changes come at a time when the cost of long-term care continues to rise, to an average of $83,950 per year for a nursing home, according to Genworth’s 2013 Cost of Care Survey.

Amid all the changes in the marketplace, one constant is the need for consumers to understand and plan for long-term care…for their parents and themselves. So while there is unrest in the market, we need to remain vigilant in educating people about the importance of planning for their future long-term care needs.

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Laura Weber Rossman is Chief Customer Officer at Longevity Alliance. Longevity Alliance is a national service that helps people find the right Medicare, long-term care and life insurance plans by listening to their needs and comparing plans from leading insurance companies. Rossman is past Chair of the Business Forum on Aging and a former member of the ASA Board of Directors.

This article was brought to you by the editorial committee of ASA’s Business Forum on Aging (BFA).